


Daniel in the Den

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Families of Choice, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Post Episode: s02e03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 18:59:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2239884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>There’s an expense fund for it--to buy up grainy photographs of his on-air talent in indelicate positions, with undesirable people.</i> Charlie finds out about Nina Howard, and decides the proper course of action to take.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daniel in the Den

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** For [mcmacthenewsroom](http://mcmacthenewsroom.tumblr.com/). I hope this does your question/prompt justice!
> 
> Takes place a week after Will's date with Nina, so in early October. Title is a reference to the biblical story of Daniel/Bastille's song _Daniel in the Den_ which I think fits Charlie, Will, and Mac all quite nicely at different points. Although in my head I called this _Benevolent Dumbledore of ACN Charlie Skinner In Action_ for awhile. 
> 
> Unbeta'd (how dare both of you be busy?), so feel free to yell at me about typos.

There are things that he gets before they become Google alerts. It’s in the nature of his position that all things deemed un-newsworthy by _Page Six_ and their tabloid ilk wind up on his desk. There’s an expense fund for it--to buy up grainy photographs of his on-air talent in indelicate positions, with undesirable people. These pictures may have only gone for eight hundred dollars a week after they were taken and shopped around, but their value is immeasurable to Charlie Skinner.

_Will McAvoy and Nina Howard outside Balthazar, 9/29/11._

There’s nothing demonstrably scandalous about the pictures. Will’s hand on her waist, Nina kissing his cheek, clutching his arm, they step into a cab together, cab drives off. Charlie’s not surprised that no one bought them, especially considering the depth to which Nina Howard’s claws are supposedly still lodged in the sphere of tabloid journalists. A woman who regularly takes bribes Manhattan’s upper echelon in six-figure neighborhood is a woman not easily crossed.

God, Will is an idiot.

Charlie’s certain that Will believes (desperately, and thoroughly) that he can reform her, and in turn, Nina will be graced with humanity and the pair of them will settle down in the grand tradition of two people pretending that they will be perfectly happy to accept second best. And MacKenzie will…  

Whatever it is Will believes that MacKenzie will do in this scenario, he hasn’t a damned idea.

But Charlie figures that he has a choice.

He can drag Will into his office, and ambush him however gently, and have him explain exactly how he sees this relationship with Nina Howard proceeding in the wake of her accessory to felony wiretapping and felony bribery and felony extortion and the targeting of him and _News Night_ and the targeting of _MacKenzie._ But he hasn’t a doubt in his mind that if he does that, sits Will down across his desk, that he’ll hunker down in his denial and in ten months someone will be covering the McAvoy-Howard nuptials that will most-assuredly end in the tabloid harpy taking half of Will’s estate and with MacKenzie out the door to CNN, taking half the staff with her.

Will requires a feather light touch.

In, of course, the event that he doesn’t need a smack upside the head.

Charlie still isn’t certain that _that_ may not be the correct course of action here. Regardless, Will’s emotional intelligence is stunted to roughly the fifth grade, at the moment he broke a bottle across his father’s face.

Sighing heavily, he picks up his phone and dials out. It’s early. Enough so that he doesn’t have to worry about Will tagging along if he asks Mac to come up to his office.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he tells her fifteen minutes later after sliding the manila folder of glossy pictures across to her. “There’s a chance, a large chance, that this will fizzle out into nothing. But I thought you should know.”

“As his executive producer?” Mac asks, pursing her lips into a pained line.

Charlie leans forward, lacing his hands together over his blotter. “Or for other reasons.”

_Let you know on all fronts you need to be fighting on._

Slowly she leafs through the photographs, growing paler and paler. Her shoulders slope forward as she stares dejectedly at the image of Will turning into where Nina was placing her mouth next to his ear.

“September the twenty-ninth?”

He nods. “That’s what is says. Why?”

Biting her lip, Mac shakes her head. It doesn’t come to Charlie as a surprise that Nina Howard is a response to something in particular, if that’s what Mac’s inquiry means.

“Sooner or later her illegal activities will be dredged up,” he says. Soothingly, he hopes. And then with a less toothless tone of voice, “Or I will ensure that they are dredged up. Will can be a jackass, but he won’t drag the show’s name through the mud like that. I don’t give a shit if the Wicked Witch of the Lower West Side can be _fixed_ or not, we can follow the money and get someone to drop of a house on her.”

“Water,” Mac idly corrects him. “The house was on her sister. I think I’m the one under the house.”

“Does that make me Glinda the Good one?”

She snorts, briefly giving him a true smile. “Only if Will is the Scarecrow.”

“Not the Cowardly Lion?” he asks, playing along. If anything else, Mac is Dorothy, putting up with Will’s bullshit on the road to home.

“I don’t think it matters much.” Sighing in a way that moves her whole body, she snaps the folder closed and tosses it on top of the desk between them. “Baum didn’t write one that only thought with his dick. I wonder if Nina’s price for killing the story about Will being taken off the 9/11 anniversary broadcast was a tumble.” Chewing on her lip again, she reconsiders. “But why dinner, then?” She laughs bitterly, self-deprecatingly. “And Will’s not a whore. At least he’s not shoving her in my face.”

“I think Will is smart enough to know that the senior staff wouldn’t take kindly to her presence,” he considers, voice measured. “And not just because she tried to ruin _News Night’s_ credibility. Will knows what he’s doing, and that the staff only knows the half of it.”

Mac ducks her head.

“It was one of your youngsters who tried to get Will to kill the takedown piece Ms. Howard was going to write of you, wasn’t it?” he asks. “And he almost wrote the check.”

“I would have killed him,” Mac mutters, discreetly wiping the tip of an index finger under her eyes.

Gently (he’ll be gentle with MacKenzie, who requires it sometimes, if only because he remembers sitting with her a week after her diagnosis, convincing her that it was time for Don Quixote, convincing her that she wasn’t the one in need of saving) he smiles at her, ignoring the tears hemmed in her eyes.

“Eventually his principles will get the better of him. Probably not until after he falls spectacularly on his face, but the boy will come around. He always does.” Charlie widens his smile. “Failing that, walk out with the staff and take them with you to NBC.”

“Charlie!” she protests, but laughs, eyes brightening.

It’s too early for bourbon (for MacKenzie, anyway, he tops off his own cup of coffee with a pour of it) but he fixes her coffee and places the delicate cup on its saucer into her hands, kissing her on the top of her head, sitting back down behind his desk in time to watch her smile falter and slide back into the anguished curve of her lips that he sees on her face far too often.

“He’s not rubbing her in my face, like he’s done with the others.” Eyes drawn to the rain beating against the windows, she licks a drop of coffee off her bottom lip. “It’s not about hurting me. Will wants to be happy. I just… what in the fuck happened at the lunch they had?”

Charlie sighs.

Maybe it’s not too early in the day for a real drink.

“Will is trying to be _happy_ with a woman who is the exact opposite of you. And by virtue of that, he is going to make himself miserable.” MacKenzie looks at him with a look of complete uncertainty, but Charlie knows all there is about missed chances and deserved self-recrimination. “It may take him awhile, but he’ll learn his lesson. You make him happy, and that terrifies him. So much so that he’s willing to see if he can make it work with an extortionist who goes against every principle that you two agree on.”

She snorts, staring at her own dim reflection in the cup of coffee resting on her thigh.

“I don’t exactly think I make Will happy. I make Will a lot of things…”

“You make Will the best he can be,” he asserts, cutting her off with an air of finality. “And that is why I brought you here seventeen months ago. Now, if you think he’s stopped reciprocating, that you feel as if--”

“Charlie.”

A slow, dizzying look of panic takes over her features. Raising his hands in front of him, he concedes.

“Alright.”

He lets her finish her coffee in quiet, contemplating all the while about the ghost of Wade Campbell. That son of a bitch had been enough--on the surface, at least--like Will for that relationship to make sense, no matter how it fell apart. But Nina Howard? She too is a simple enough puzzle though, Charlie figures. He’s confident that she’ll ruin it for herself in time. Perhaps not with the aplomb with which Wade jettisoned himself out of MacKenzie’s life, but in some spectacular fashion nevertheless.

In the meantime--

“I need to get back to work,” MacKenzie says, placing the cup and saucer on the edge of his desk and standing. “There’s still a lot of cleaning up to be done, after Uganda.”

He follows her to his feet.

“Thank you,” she says with an air of forced certainty, dipping her head in a jerky nod. “For the forewarning.”

“Of course,” he replies, almost as an afterthought. Walking to the door, her posture is slackened with defeat; Charlie raps his knuckles against the top of his desk. “He’ll come around,” he tells her. “All men are idiots, but we usually come around. The Cowardly Lion got his act together eventually, I think. And we know that Dorothy got home safe and sound. Happy endings exist.”

Maybe not for people like him, but he has to believe in Mac and Will still having enough time to put it back together again.

For a moment, he thinks on Reese, and then chases him from his mind. In the end, everything but the road to home and the people on it with you usually wind up being nothing more than smoke and mirrors and bullshit.

“I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that,” Mac answers quietly, scuffing at the carpet with the toe of a black high-heel.

“You’d be surprised.” Sometimes it’s the simplest things that make you realize how completely you’ve been party to your own wretchedness. Still, Charlie refuses to let Mac leave without bringing a smile back to her face. “I’ll buy you a pair of red Louboutins.”

“Now you’ve made yourself the Wizard,” she says, scrunching up her nose.

“Nah, I just know that Will is a leg man,” he says with a laugh, before saying again, more forcefully, “He’ll come around. Preferably before my chances at getting grandchildren out of you two runs out.”

 _That does it_ , he thinks, Mac’s face split by a grin that is one part flustered and two parts annoyed. Rolling her eyes, she opens the door and disappears through it, shutting it behind her. Faintly, he can hear her say goodbye to Millie before her voice fades away entirely.

Sighing heavily, Charlie sits back down behind his desk, and makes a note to have an assistant buy up every picture of Will and Nina that they can locate.

Eventually someone will find it profitable to draw Nina Howard’s ire and start publishing articles about the pair ( _MEDIA ELITE IN BED WITH THE ENEMY_ , Charlie can see the headlines now; or if Nina herself is behind the publicization of the relationship, possibly something more along the lines of _FACE OF ACN AND THE NEW FIRST LADY OF BROADCAST NEWS,_ god forbid) but until that day (and on which day Will _will_ be sitting sheepishly on the other side his desk) he wants to know what’s happening every step of the way.

Just in case.

So at least he and Mac know what they’re fighting against.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
